Immigrant Grads are Making Powerful Statements with Inspiring Caps

It's the end of May, which means that young people everywhere are probably doing traditional graduation stuff: signing yearbooks, pulling pranks, wearing robes and tassels and square caps, and marching across a stage.

This year, though, some grads are taking to social media to highlight their stories as students from immigrant families, tagging their posts #immigrad. The hashtag, started by the nonprofit Define American and Undocumedia to call attention to graduating immigrant students, has racked up hundreds of posts in the past few weeks, with many students decorating their caps to make a strong statement about their cultural pride.

Nearly a quarter of all children under 18 in the United States are either first- or second-generation Americans—meaning they either immigrated here as children or were born in America to immigrant parents. Another 65,000 undocumented students graduate from American high schools each year.

When President Obama was in office, the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program protected from deportation more than 700,000 so-called "dreamers"—kids who were brought to the United States illegally while they were children. President Trump, of course, has called for a crackdown on illegal immigration, but he has said that dreamers will not be targeted. In April, however, a 23-year-old immigrant sued the government, claiming he was deported despite his status as a dreamer who had been in the United States since he was nine years old.

There's no law saying undocumented students can't go to college, but they're barred from any federally funded financial aid, so they can't get loans, grants, scholarships, or work-study positions. Most states won't offer undocumented students state-funded aid either. That means that until there's an established path to citizenship for undocumented children, a college degree remains out of reach for many—no matter how hard they work in school.

Not all immigrant grads are dreamers—not all come from families that immigrated illegally—and, in general, the immigrant experience encompasses a broad range of circumstances. But regardless of the specifics, graduating as a first- or second-generation American is something special. If your parents resettled here to give you a better life, you've just attained one of the key things that makes that possible: an education.

We can't get enough of these caps, so we've collected a selection of our favorites, below.